Resumes matter

You come of age in a certain era, you are stuck with its sensibilities, no matter how deep you try to bury them. And so the idea of Uber has always unnerved me.

Don't get in cars with strangers: How many times did I hear that one, growing up?

It should have occurred to me that the opposite is true, too, in the transactional dynamic of what can only be called Picking Up Strangers In Cars Inc. And so here's this young female Uber driver picking up a drunk partygoer one night, apparently aware only that he was some celebrity athlete, because his companions told her that.

That celebrity athlete was Jameis Winston, the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Whom the Uber driver says grabbed her crotch -- a violation, it should be noted, made notorious of by Our Only Available President, who famously extolled it in one of his many Reprehensible Human Being moments.

Winston, of course, denies this. One of his buddies who was with him that night backs him up, saying he was in the backseat with Winston the entire time. One of his other buddies calls BS on that, saying they put Winston in the front seat of the car alone and off he went, alone.

It weirdly fits the storyline, and is a regrettable sign of the times, too, that the latter buddy is a former college football player now serving time for his part in a rape at Vanderbilt University. So we have this bizarre scenario where an NFL player (and his attorneys) will no doubt try to discredit allegations of sexual assault against him by pointing out that one of the witnesses is serving time for sexual assault -- and therefore must be lying.

In the meantime, there is this woman, who (it must said) has no reason to lie. And there is Winston, who has every reason. And most of those reasons involve his personal resume, which is not going to help him here.

Winston, remember, was an incoming (and much ballyhooed) freshman at Florida State when he was accused of sexually assaulting a coed. A year later, a smirking goober of a DA refused to indict him, and a Florida State Title IX hearing cleared him. Which will happen when you've just led your school to the national title.

Still, that's on his resume, fairly or not. Being accused of stealing crab legs from a grocery store is on his resume. Firing BB guns on campus and screaming obscenities actually got him suspended for (gasp!) half a game.

None of these episodes proves anything in and of itself. Taken in total, though, they reveal at the very least a serious and persistent lack of judgment. This is especially true in this latest case. Even if the allegations are untrue, why, with what's on your resume, put yourself in a position where these sorts of allegations can happen?  Why wouldn't you go to extraordinary lengths to make sure they don't happen? Particularly against the backdrop of  #MeToo -- which if nothing else indicates women aren't going to be silent anymore?

This is why the NFL has slapped a pre-emptory three-game suspension on Winston. As with most NFL discipline, it is capricious and inconsistent, given that the baseline suspension for sexual misconduct and domestic abuse is supposed to be six games. But it also speaks to Winston's history of bad judgment, and that, presumably, is why he's been docked three games.

Lesser players (hello, Johnny Manziel) now are getting run out of the league on a rail for less. The zeitgeist is turning, even in the NFL. Not a good time to remain oblivious of that.

Not a good time to have chronic bad judgment, now that chronic bad judgment is out.